SCLoS Philosopher

The Age of Empire is Over

2007-08-19T09:41:00.001-07:00

South Carolina declared her secession from Great Britain on 15 March, 1776. South Carolina became a sovereign nation upon that day.

The British, after decisive defeats at King's Mountain and Cowpens, South Carolina, retreated through North Carolina, to surrender at Norfolk, Virginia. It was in these southern states where separation from Great Britain was made permanent.

More battles were fought in South Carolina than in any other state (13). Moreover, it was on South Carolina soil where the tides of war turned decisively against the enemy.

The United States, therefore, owes a substantial debt to South Carolina. Thirty thousand enemy troops still handily occupied New York when Cornwallis was forced to surrender at Yorktown, Virginia.

If South Carolina's secession from Great Britain was lawful, at that time, then South Carolina's secession from the United States was lawful, as well.

No matter where the right of South Carolina to declare herself independent of Great Britain is thought to have originated, if this right is held to have existed at all, than South Carolina retains that same right to this day, for the agreement signed by representatives of the government of South Carolina, through which the federated system was established, did not yield, to any organ of that creation, the authority to ban South Carolina from reasserting her right to resume her independence at some future date.

It is unreasonable to interpret South Carolina's signing of the constitution as indicating any intent on her part to abrogate her right of secession at some later date, not only because nowhere in the document is that claim made, but also because, at the time South Carolina signed that document, she had only recently proven the right of secession against bloody disputation.

In contrast, it was the tyrant Lincoln's war against South Carolina that was unlawful. In its bloody execution Lincoln betrayed the principle of voluntary association that had been established by the founders of the federation known as the United States.

He betrayed South Carolina. He betrayed North Carolina. He betrayed Virginia and he betrayed Maryland.

In fact, Lincoln betrayed the the northern states, as well. In leading the (voluntarily) united states down the false path of despotism, Lincoln suborned the noble principles of federalism, upon which their amicable association had been founded.

In short, in 1865 a federated republic of free states was violently transformed into a centralizing empire, destined, in time, to die an empire's sordid death.

Aikhe

SOUTH CAROLINA LEAGUE OF THE SOUTH

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No Nanny State

2007-07-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

This man writes that conditions today frighten him and give him the "creeps." What can we say but "get a grip"? Things are as they are. One by one people are waking up, but will they organize and shake off their programming or will they just doze back off:

Yesterday on Independence Day, I was virtually forced to stay indoors all day. Hotter than hell. It was 102 at 2 in the afternoon. BBQ was supposed to start after it cooled down at 6pm. Wrong. It was up to 105!

Anyway, I spent virtually the entire day in front of the TV watching, "The Revolution" on The History Channel. It was a 13 hour series on the American Revolutionary War.

I didn't know how much I didn't know!

I must say, I was taken back by how much propaganda was used - by both sides - in their attempts to win The Hearts And Minds of the populous.

The Americans, thankfully, had Thomas Paine. I had heard of him and his, "Common Sense" pamphlet, but I didn't understand its importance in our fight for freedom. I think I can accurately state that, were in not for, "Common Sense" and Paine's other work, "The American Crisis", we might be eating scones and drinking Earl Grey tea on a more regular basis.

The content and timing of the messages in each document were crucial in our secession from the UK. The parallels with America today are nothing short of frightening. From, "Common Sense": "SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."

Read more:- No Nanny State - Molon Labe!:

Small Is Powerful

2007-06-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

The response to the last presidential election in this country has been regional and holds the seeds of a real separatist movement. A group on the West Coast called MoveonCalifornia was established in November 2004 and has since been holding meetings under the rubric of a “Committee to Explore California Secession.” The League of the South, which has been pressing for Southern secession for some decades, has found renewed fervor for its cause. A group in New Mexico has proposed a “Republica del Norte” that might include Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and southern Colorado. Hawaii has three secessionist organizations and there’s a move to have a statewide referendum on a return to the independent state it once was. The Alaska Independence Party has been a real force in the state for years—it even got Walter Hickel elected governor on its slate in 1991, though he soon rejected the party—and now has grown to more than 20,000 members, the largest statewide third party in America. And a group in New York City, connected to a weekly called the Brooklyn Rail, has been writing and meeting and propagandizing for a Free NYC movement. - Kirkpatrick Sale

Read more at World Prout Assembly
http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/06/small_is_powerf.html

2007-06-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

The Death of American Empire

Posted by Patrick Foy on June 12, 2007

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. --George Bernard Shaw

Step back and look at the big picture. The farther you step back, the bigger the picture gets. Step back too far, and the world becomes a reductio ad absurdum, resulting in a kind of Buddhism. My departed friend Charles Bukowski wrote in one of his many poems, “We cannot acquire too much...there are laws we know nothing of.” What prompts this avenue of thought is a gloomy editorial not too long ago in Capitol Hill Blue by its founder, Doug Thompson, out of Washington, D.C. Every once in a while, like some of us, Thompson seems to nosedive into a depression. The title of his article ( March 9th, 2007) indicates as much: “Turn off the life support: America is dead”. Here’s a sample:

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pull the plug on this failed democratic republic called The United States of America. Turn off the life support. Disconnect the IVs. The US of A is brain dead with no chance for revival....

It doesn’t matter who controls Congress. Congress is a dead institution, ruled by timid legislators who no longer exercise any real role in the governing of this nation. It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court may or may not do. The President of the United States has declared himself a “war time President” and granted himself dictatorial rights that no one in Congress or the Court appears able to successfully challenge him....

We need to rethink this experiment called America. Maybe we need to start with a clean sheet of paper.... Maybe it’s time for a new American Revolution. After all, the last one started because another guy named George tried to destroy our way of life.

All of this may be accurate, but it is too idealistic. [In fact, in the interim, Thompson has toned down the article, removing some of what has just been quoted.] We do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world of the possible, the tolerable, and/or the just barely manageable. We cannot go back to the dream of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic or to its original Constitution. To attempt to halt the present day free-for-all in America and begin anew would likely make matters worse, opening the door to greater demagoguery and perhaps complete chaos.

The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned. That optimistic framework of self-governance and independence was rendered irrelevant by the Civil War (a.k.a. The War of Northern Aggression) which lasted from 1861 to 1865. The legitimate issue of slavery aside, when half the country invades, pillages, ransacks and subjugates the other half, that event can in no way be indicative of the rule of law, and was certainly not authorized by the Constitution. The Civil War marked the end of the American Republic of 1789. We live in the aftermath, a postscript; we are making it up as we go along. Many wonderful and fantastic achievements have occurred during this aftermath--in the realm of inventions, science, entertainment, industry, space exploration, the arts, business, etcetera--for which Americans can justly be proud. But many terrible things have happened as well, mostly in the governmental sector, for which Washington must take the blame, along with the citizenry who tolerated or ignored what Washington was doing.

On the foreign policy horizon, let’s keep everything in perspective and on the table. G.W. Bush, who is a modern day, real-life Charlie McCarthy, and his mentor, Richard Cheney, who corresponds to Edgar Bergen, are only symptoms of a larger problem, a mystery bigger than the aberration misnamed “neoconservatism”. Bush and Cheney are the end-products of an historical development a century in the making.

Read the rest of the article at Taki's Top Drawer: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_death_of_american_empire/

Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.

The South Carolina League of the South leads the way.